While always a challenge for writers, the dystopian future has become, in recent years, a highly sought after subject. From the "Hunger Games" to the fifth and final season of Fox’s "Fringe" to NBC’s "Revolution" to the "Total Recall" remake from Columbia Pictures, 2012 alone has definitely seen its share of dystopian futures. Even the fairy tale writers of "Once Upon a Time" on ABC are dabbling in it as refugees fight to survive in a not-so-enchanted Enchanted Forest. With the surge in popularity, it is only natural that writers, budding and established alike, are going to attempt to create their own.
The question is, what makes a good, and believable, dystopian future?
The first thing you must do is create a reason for your future. There is a question among writers and readers both regarding whether or not it is important to include these background details in the actual story but in order to make it real to readers, it must be just as real to the writer. That means, including it in the body of your story is your choice but you should know what brought us (by “us” I mean humanity, Earthlings, Earth) to the point we have reached in your story.
This is where writers of science fiction and fantasy encounter a double-edged sword. Crime writers, romance writers, historical fiction writers have factual evidence to research, real sources to consult to create their stories. Sci-fi and fantasy writers do all, or at least most of their research inside their own heads. It is no less research but it is almost entirely made up. It is easier because anything can be, as long as you can create the facts needed to back it up solidly enough for your readers to believe it can be. But it is more difficult than consulting historical texts or crime statistics because you have to create enough evidence for your readers to buy what you are selling them.
Also, in creating your why, you need to have a reason for this being your story’s setting - how is this all going to end, what will be the ultimate goal of the whole thing? Ultimately, from a literary criticism point of view, dystopian future fiction is not too far removed from the fable. All of the most memorable futuristic sci-fi and fantasy teaches us - both as readers and as the grand “us” contained within the fiction - something. Like with the fable, there is a lesson to be learned in the end. The story has to be escalated from a simple romance or tale of feuding siblings; the events of the story have to be relevant to the future you have created.
Once you have created a reason for your dystopia, you have to throw your moral compass out the window. In a dystopian future, quite often, we find a hero or group of heroes who are pushed to their ultimate limits and forced to do things that would be abhorrent in today’s society. "The Hunger Games," for example, is based on ordinary, otherwise innocent teenagers engaged in a death battle, killing one another brutally in an attempt to keep themselves alive. Torture, murder, theft, even less boisterously immoral acts such as genetic manipulation and human cloning are all quite common place in the dystopian future fiction.
And you can’t just skip the bad parts. You are creating a dystopia, which is by definition, a bad place. The Free Dictionary defines it as “an imaginary place or state in which the condition of life is extremely bad, as from deprivation, oppression, or terror” (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dystopia). It is those conditions - deprivation, oppression and terror - that lead people to revert to primal instincts. Leaving them, and your characters’ equally bad reactions out would be disloyal to the genre and disserving to your readers. It is those conditions that draw people to the dystopian fiction genre.
Don’t, however, be violent or gruesome for violence’s sake. Returning to the idea of getting your audience to buy what you are selling, immoral and abhorrent behavior from your characters needs to be provoked and in some way, justifiable. Even if it is not necessarily what we as readers in our comfy beds in our comfy lives might consider rational, it needs to have a purpose. Suspicion, superstition, “kill or be killed” are all acceptable reasons for violence in your story. “Because it felt good,” is acceptable once, not every time someone fires a gun or throws a punch. Leave the overwrought violence to the grindhouse horror writers.
Once you have tackled these hurdles, the best thing you can do is make sure your hook has something new and exciting to offer or catching fish is going to be a lot harder in a sea of similar hooks. That is to say, make sure you have a flare no one else has offered to the fans of the genre. Something eye catching and original.
Comments